"A Song for Simeon" was the sixteenth in the series and included an illustration by avant garde artist Edward McKnight Kauffer.

In the poem, Eliot retells the story of Simeon from the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, a just and devout Jew who encounters Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus entering the Temple of Jerusalem.

In 1925, Eliot became a poetry editor at the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, Ltd.,[4]: pp.50–51  after a career in banking, and subsequent to the success of his earlier poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), "Gerontion" (1920) and "The Waste Land" (1922).

He was baptised into the Anglican faith on 29 June 1927 at Finstock, in Oxfordshire, and was confirmed the following day in the private chapel of Thomas Banks Strong, Bishop of Oxford.

[4]: pp.18 [6]: pp.20, 212, 223  Eliot converted in private, but subsequently declared in his 1927 preface to a collection of essays titled For Lancelot Andrewes that he considered himself a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.

[6]: p.223 [7][8] When his conversion became known, it was "an understandable choice to those around him" given his intellectual convictions, and that "he could not have done anything less than seek what he regarded as the most ancient, most sacramental, and highest expression of the Christian faith that forms the indisputable basis for the culture and civilization of modern Europe".

[11][12] In 1927, Eliot was asked by his employer, Geoffrey Faber, to write one poem each year for a series of illustrated pamphlets with holiday themes to be sent to the firm's clients and business acquaintances as Christmas greetings.

Four of Eliot's five Ariel poems, including "A Song for Simeon", were accompanied by illustrations by American-born avant garde artist, E. McKnight Kauffer.[15]: passim.

Faber and Gwyer printed "A Song for Simeon" in an 8½-inch × 5½-inch Demy Octavo (8vo) pamphlet in blue paper wraps with title in black ink.

[20]: p.70–72 [21] Eliot's style of monologue used in the poem (and in many of his works) draws heavily from the influence of English Victorian poet Robert Browning (1812–1889).

However, in "A Song for Simeon" and these poems, Eliot continues the progression of his themes of alienation in a changing world, and fuses with this the tenets of his newfound faith.

[34] Scofield states that the imagery of "A Song for Simeon"—including the symbol of a feather, its setting amid Roman hyacinths and the winter sun—conveys "a sense of wonder and fragile new life".

Eliot uses the biblical story of Simeon to illustrate the "contrast between appearance and reality and humbly begs God to teach him the stillness that unifies the two".

[37] Andrewes, in a 1619 Ash Wednesday sermon, emphasised that conversion "must come from both mind and heart, thought and feeling, 'the principall [sic] and most proper act of a true turning to God.

[23]: pp.209–211 Eliot's Simeon appears similar to Dante's depiction of Virgil in the Divine Comedy, as "the seer who can see only so far; the precursor who cannot enter the world that he makes possible".

Scholar Louis Menand states that while Simeon is treated respectfully by Eliot, his characterisation is "in the tradition of Christian condescension toward the virtuous heathen".

[42] Comparatively, Craig Raine, a poet and an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford, wrote a book-length defence of Eliot against the claims of deliberate anti-Semitism and argues that "A Song for Simeon" provides a sympathetic discussion of the Jewish diaspora.

[43] University of British Columbia scholar John Xiros Cooper states that the accusations of anti-Semitism lodged against Eliot rest "on a few isolated lines of poetry" and a passing reference in one prose text.

"[46]: p.62 Anthony Julius, a British lawyer who is one of Eliot's most trenchant critics on this issue, writes that "A Song for Simeon" is "exceptional in a poetry in which elsewhere Jews are dumb.

[20]: pp.30, 70–71  Julius compares Simeon to Moses stating that he is "fated to see the Promised Land but not to enter it ... witness to its truth, but denied its redemptive power, the Jew stands solemnly, humbly, outside Christianity's gates".

Further, Julius draws on a quote from Eliot's earlier poem "Gerontion" to say that in this Christian future the Jews "may find a ledge there to squat on".